Paris: The Strike...

I did a lot in Paris, so much that I'm going to have to split my weekend into multiple posts...starting with, my getting-there adventure!

So the French transportation people decided to go on strike last week, thus closing the airports starting on Thursday, the day I was scheduled to fly to Paris. Originally I was supposed to fly into an airport about an hour outside of the city and then take a bus in. If only it was that easy...

My trip consisted of 5 parts, most of which went smoothly, aside from the whole strike fiasco.

Part 1: I had class until 2 and a train to catch at 2:30. After my class I called the cab company while walking out to the street. I guess since there were so many people standing out there, walking to and from class, the cab didn't know who to look for, so it didn't show. Luckily, one pulled into the library driveway to drop a bunch of people off, so I just got in and went to the train station. I got there with some time to spare and made it onto the train!

Part 2: We made it to the airport exactly when we expected to. The lines were all really short (because of the strike) so we were able to get our passports checked with no problem. However, when we showed our tickets to the worker guy he asked if we had heard about our flight. When we responded with, "no, is there something to hear?" he informed us that our flight was no longer landing in Paris, but instead landing in Brussels and that there would be a bus from the Brussels airport to the Paris airport! Yay!

Part 3: When we landed in Brussels we went through customs, got another stamp in our passports and began to look for the bus to Paris. Once we found it and got on, I realized that the driver was multi-talented. Not only was he driving a manual car from Brussels to Paris, he was smoking at the same time! It was a fun few hours. It would've been nicer had it been light out, but oh well.

Part 4: Eventually we got to the Paris airport. We even got there a little before schedule. Something we all realized once we got there though, was that because of the strike, the airport was closed...The thought that there might not be a bus from the airport into Paris suddenly crossed my mind. Luckily we found a lady who was from France but had been living in Glasgow for a few years, so her English was great. She asked the person at the information desk about the bus and we realized that the bus was on its way since it was through a private company and not on strike. So that worked out well.

Part 5: Once we made it into the city, the lady helped us with the cab and told the driver (in French) where we were going. It was so expensive!

After a day of traveling, we made it to Paris!